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David J. Dausey

Education

Post-grad in higher education management, Harvard University; Ph.D. in epidemiology and public health, Yale University; M.Phil. in epidemiology and public health, Yale University; B.A. in psychology, Mercyhurst University

Overview

David J. Dausey is an epidemiologist and public health expert who consults as a researcher for the RAND Corporation. Dausey is dean of the School of Health Professions, chair of the Public Health Department, and a tenured (full) professor of public health at Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pennsylvania. He is also the director of the Mercyhurst Institute for Public Health. He holds an honorary faculty position at Carnegie Mellon University where he is a distinguished service professor. Dausey was a full-time researcher at RAND from 2003 to 2008. Since 2008, he has actively collaborated with RAND's global public health unit. At RAND, his research has focused on public health systems and networks, global public health, bioterrorism, public health preparedness, infectious disease surveillance, and behavioral health. In this capacity, Dausey has worked with state and local public health departments throughout the United States as well as ministries of health around the world. He has more than 100 scholarly publications including RAND reports and journal articles. Dausey is a recipient of RAND's Gold Award for his research evaluating pandemic influenza preparedness in Southeast Asia. He was formerly a teaching fellow at Yale University and a program analyst at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Dausey received his bachelor's degree in psychology from Mercyhurst College, his master's and doctoral degrees in epidemiology and public health from Yale University, and post-graduate training in higher education management and leadership at Harvard University.

Describes a tool for assessing key features of good crisis decision making that focuses on the processes of decision making -- situational awareness, action planning, and process control -- and can be used for exploratory analysis and process improvement.

Contains a template that public health agencies can use to conduct a workshop to improve key aspects of Strategic National Stockpile planning: pediatric dispensing, altered standards of care, and allocation of scarce resources.

Coordination and communication among community partners-including health departments, emergency management agencies, and hospitals-are essential for effective pandemic influenza planning and response. As the nation's largest integrated health care system, the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) could be a key component of community planning.

In this article, the authors argue that initial funding priorities for public health systems research on preparedness should focus on using engineering-style methods to identify core preparedness processes, developing novel data sources and measures based on smaller-scale proxy events, and developing performance improvement approaches to support the translation of research into practice within the wide variety of public health systems found in the nation.

Health departments can achieve optimal performance by consistently connecting a caller with an action officer in 30 minutes or less and may improve performance by using a disease surveillance phone system in which a live person answers at all times.

Gun ownership rates, state legislation, and levels of community cohesiveness are significantly associated with the likelihood of psychiatric patients committing suicide with a gun, as well as being male, Caucasian, and diagnosed with substance abuse.

This fact sheet describes tabletop exercises in six Georgia health districts and at the state level to understand what coordination and public health response are required among groups with diverse responsibilities and at different government levels.

This report presents the findings of a project designed to identify system-level characteristics associated with consistently timely responses in telephone-based disease surveillance systems in local health departments.

This column discusses the experiences of the original cohort of seven states participating in the first two years of a national demonstration project known as the Co-occurring State Incentive Grant (COSIG) initiative.

Describes a new quality-improvement tool that public health agencies can adopt to regularly look back at each routine annual influenza season to systematically institutionalize knowledge from one influenza season to the next.

A fully customizable template for a tabletop exercise for pandemic influenza preparedness for use by state and local health agencies and their healthcare and governmental partners as an exercise in training, relationship building, and evaluation.

Reports on an exercise examining the intentional introduction of avian influenza in commercial poultry operations during a severe human influenza season and explores issues associated with public health preparedness for major disease outbreaks.

RAND developed the exercises in this manual as templates that local public health agencies (LPHAs) can customize and use to train public health workers in detecting and responding to bioterrorism events and assessing LPHAs' levels of preparedness.

In the fall of 2000, the Department of Health and Human Services awarded a contract to evaluate the implementation and impact of MH/SA parity benefits in terms of access, utilization, cost, and quality of care. The findings of this evaluation are reported in the attached report.

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